Arrow Shipbroking has beefed up its dry bulk chartering desk with Bery Maritime's Stian Hallan.

The move is one of many similar shop jumps in Singapore made during the tight labour market caused by pandemic travel restrictions.

Hallan, who headed Bery Maritime's Singapore office as its managing director for the past eight years, revealed his career move in a LinkedIn post.

"I'm extremely pleased to announce that after three months of gardening leave (yes, some real gardening took place), I'm finally up and running with Arrow Shipbrokers in Singapore," he said.

At Arrow, Hallan will be covering the handysize to supramax segments.

Bery's website lists Scott Stoneham as managing director of its Singapore office. Stoneham has been with the company since 2014.

The past 16 months have seen numerous changes in the employee rosters at the Singapore offices of many shipbroking shops and other shipping-related companies.

Broader restrictions have made it difficult for companies to bring in foreign staff throughout the pandemic. The task was almost impossible for several months after the Delta variant outbreak this year.

Heads of several broking shops said during this period that they were living in fear of staff quitting, because finding replacements in Singapore was extremely difficult.

Poaching staff from other shops was rife, but this came at a high cost, to entice candidates to quit their existing jobs.

As TradeWinds reported earlier on Monday, Singapore has begun to open its borders through a Vaccinated Travel Lane (VTL) program.

The programme allows travel for work and leisure between Singapore and selected countries without the need for quarantine, provided travellers arrive on dedicated VTL flights.

Pilot programmes with Germany and Brunei began in September.

On Saturday, Singaporean authorities announced that travel lanes with Canada, Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK and the US would open on 18 October.

A VTL agreement with South Korea is scheduled to come into effect on 15 November.